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What Nick Kristof Doesn't Get About the Ivory Tower

Are academics useless? That’s what many in the journalism and think-tank world seem to think. At least, that is, when they’re not cherry-picking our hard-won data sets, calling us bleary-eyed at ungodly hours for a quote or misconstruing the finely nuanced points of our journal articles to make a political argument.

Last Sunday, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof blasted the academy for being so cloistered in the ivory tower that its influence over policy was minimal. “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors,” he lamented, “but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.”

Ouch. The CEO of Foreign Policy magazine and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations subsequently tweeted their support for Kristof’s thesis, while a plethora of academics—including yours truly—have pushedbackhard against his claims, most of us arguing that scholars are actually more engaged in the public arena than in the past—we’re tweeting, blogging, writing op-eds and essays and doing our TV duty like never before. All while trying to secure tenure so we never have to do an honest day’s work again (joking, boss!).

Full disclosure: I have some sympathy for Kristof’s argument. Any normal person who’s tried to leaf through an academic journal will chuckle at headlines like “Pre-Birth Factors, Post-Birth Factors, and Voting: Evidence from Swedish Adoption Data” or “Freedom, Form, and Formlessness: Euripides’ Bacchae and Plato’s Republic.” (Here’s another winner: “Administrative Unit Proliferation.” Such clickbait!)

But when it comes to my little patch of academe, international relations, I think Kristof has it mostly wrong. And I think I’m in a unique position to shed some light on why the three tribes that dominate the discussion of foreign affairs—academics, Beltway types and money folks—don’t always get along.

One of the perks of teaching at a policy school is mixing with all three tribes. As a professor, I’m intimately familiar with the tribe of academia. I’ve also worked in government, traveled frequently to Washington and even have non-resident fellow status at Brookings. Through hard work, I’ve come to know the mix of journalists, columnists, think-tankers and “formers” that make up the Beltway tribe all too well.And the more one writes about the state of the global economy—my usual focus—the more one encounters the consultants, traders and market analysts that make up the money folk. Since the global financial crisis, as the significance of international economics has become more recognized, this tribe has inserted itself into the foreign policy debate.

I’ve had the opportunity to see all three groups try to interpret world affairs, with mixed results. None of these tribes are a monolithic group – indeed, at times, the internecine squabbles are far fiercer than the intertribal warfare. That said, there are certain tropes that mark each of these tribes as a distinct community. And the truth is that each tribe has justified reasons for scorning the other two. All of these tribes have their genuine strengths when it comes to foreign policy analysis, but none of them possess a monopoly of wisdom. Indeed, their blind spots are massive – and most of the time, they lack the self-awareness to know that they exist.

First, the strengths. Since it is their primary reason for existence, it should not be surprising that the Beltway folk bring some serious assets to the foreign policy table. The economist Friedrich von Hayek coined the term “local knowledge” to refer to the expertise gained from being on the ground close to a situation. The Beltway tribe has local knowledge of the policymaking process in Washington, a not inconsiderable advantage. Academics and market analysts can talk about the obvious strategic benefits of, say, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It is the Beltway types, however, who know about the minutiae of the negotiations, about the struggle to get trade promotion authority through the Senate, about the implications of taking Max Baucus out of the equation. I cannot recall an instance in which I knew more about the arcana of a particular policy more than my think-tanker colleagues who focused on it.

The Beltway folk’s other comparative advantage is that they are the group most likely to gain a policymaker’s ear. President Obama’s predilection for wooing foreign affairs columnists is a known fact, but he’s hardly an anomaly in this regard. Most policy principals engage with the Beltway tribe to “work the refs”—but the dialogue cuts both ways. If D.C. insiders form a consensus about a particular course of action, policymakers have no choice but to acknowledge and respond to it. Even if the Beltway consensus is wrong – and we’ll get to that – the consensus is a political fact of life that alters the calculus of the people making the decisions.

The money folk also bring some advantages to the table. Their most obvious advantage is speed. In recent years, as I’ve researched the impact of sovereign wealth funds or the relative strength of China, I’ve been impressed at how much quicker market analysts have been than either academics or think-tankers in perceiving and analyzing emerging trends. Whenever a new issue crops up on the radar, it’s usually the likes of Goldman Sachs or the McKinsey Global Institute that often puts out the first substantive analysis. When market folk judge the state of the world, they are usually relying on the freshest data. For example, I attended multiple “big think” conferences in early 2008, where academics and wonks alike talked about what the next U.S. president would get to do once he (or she) took office. All of the market participants at these conferences explained that—sorry—the coming financial crisis was going to wipe out those hopes and dreams. Similarly, this tribe has been the quickest to downgrade China’s long-term growth trajectory. In comparison, D.C. folk still talk about China as if its rise to hegemony is inexorable.

Data also gets at the heart of the other comparative advantage of the money folk: they can deploy it the most effectively to make their case. Management consultants figured out the power of graphs and charts long before Ezra Klein or Business Insider appeared on the scene. As we shall see, the foreign policy community can be allergic to numbers. Where market folk excel, however, is in finding the one number, metric or chart that will capture the attention of the audience, the “takeaway” stat.

The academic tribe also brings some important assets to the debate. The biggest strength of academics who take an interest in policy is their deep background and substantive knowledge of the subject at hand. Academics have usually read the most about whatever issue area or trouble spot du jour is on the foreign policy agenda. This does not mean that academics can automatically identify the best policy option available. What they can usually do is avoid the really God-awful choices, because they’re burdened with the knowledge of all the things that can go wrong. It’s not a coincidence that a much larger fraction of academics opposed Operation Iraq Freedom than D.C.-based policy wonks. Academics are the best at playing Whac-a-Mole with the unending analogies that compare the current state of the world with, say, Munich or the run-up to the First World War.

Academics are also sophisticated about theory. To the other tribes, this doesn’t sound like an asset; Beltway and market folk like to disdain theories as abstract and unrealistic. Of course, these tribes then go on to articulate their own implicit theories, whether they call them “analogies” or “rules of thumb” or “granular analysis” or “projections.” Academics are more upfront about the fact that they have theories of world politics. This means that we are also are more capable of recognizing when those theories will be falsified – and when we need to cast about for new models.

So, congratulations, everybody: Each of the three tribes bring some strengths to the game of foreign policy analysis. It should be noted, though, the strengths are not unique to any one tribe. I have met Beltway insiders capable of incorporating new data as quickly as market analysts, academics possessing a bounty of inside information and market folk with a solid grounding in the social sciences. It is in their weaknesses that each tribe really becomes distinctive.

Market analysts, for example, are prone to “chartism” in their forecasts. Chartists look for regular patterns in their data to develop short-term predictions – but they do not necessarily possess a causal logic for why any particular pattern is significant. One year the salient pattern might have to do with consumer credit; another year it is government tax revenues. Each of them can seem compelling in the moment, but it is actually rare for any single data stream to be decisive. Nate Silver neatly identified the trouble with chartists in The Signal and the Noise: They over-interpret random movements in the data as predictable. Worse, because they are convinced that they have found a True Predictor, they will evangelize its value far beyond its real worth.

Market folk also demonstrate a serious weakness in applying their tools to explain politics. Ironically, since 2008 more and more financial actors have invested in political analysis – but actual political behavior can flummox them. To be clear, market participants are usually pretty adept at identifying the economic pressures that could force politicians to act. It is predicting those how politicians will react to those pressures where the consultants and traders fall down. In my conversations with this tribe during the 2013 debt ceiling showdowns, for example, they were constantly surprised at the bargaining failures that kept recurring. Politicians have different incentives than market participants – a fact that sometimes escapes them when they think about the world.

One of the Beltway tribe’s greatest strengths is also one of its greatest weaknesses: groupthink. As I noted before, a Beltway consensus actually counts for something in the world of international policymaking. That does not mean that this consensus emerges from any solid analysis, however. For example, a hidden cause of the enthusiasm for austerity in Washington that crested in 2010 was the consensus among foreignpolicypundits that U.S. debt was spiraling out of control, rendering Washington vulnerable to foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries. This groupthink formed at the same time that the budget deficit as a percentage of output was shrinking at the fastest rate in American history. By the time the consensus had emerged, however, the change in the facts didn’t matter. Since the principal activity of Beltway folk is to talk to each other, the result is a feedback loop of confirmation bias that eventually leads to epistemic closure.

One of the most pernicious examples of Beltway groupthink has been on display in the past week. Clearly, Kristof’s column exposed a deep skepticism about the validity of political science to explain the world. As a political scientist, I can certainly attest to the flaws in my own discipline. What is interesting, however, is that surveys of policymakers on this question reveals some pretty clear prejudices. As a forthcoming International Studies Quarterly essay reveals, “policymakers are relatively tolerant of complex modeling and statistical work in economics and survey research but not in other areas of political science and international relations.” At the same time, these same Beltway folk bemoan the failure of political scientists to be as “relevant” as economics. That equation does not add up.

I’m keenly aware of my tribe’s shortcomings. Despite considerably headway made in the past decade or so, we academics still have a problem with accessibility. Part of it is as simple as having professional journals that are inaccessible to laymen. Another element of it is the priority of the most important audience. The Beltway tribe and the money tribe cater to invested audiences – their principal motivation is getting people who matter to listen to them. The most important audience to an academic is… other academics. It’s great when academics can express their ideas to policymakers, but that will always be the hobby and not the job.

Inaccessibility is not our biggest weakness, however – as many have noted this past week, the situation on this front is actually trending for the better. No, the biggest academic weakness is a mismatch between what academics want and what policymakers need. For the academic interested in policymaking, the presumed goal is translating cutting-edge research into accessible prose for those in power. That can be useful, but what is even more useful is telling policymakers facts that seem obvious to academics. It’s the settled wisdom in the academy, the “blinding glimpse of the obvious,” that often needs to be disseminated to policymakers. Because academics mostly talk to other academics, however, they are often unaware that what seems obvious to them is not obvious at all to the other tribes.

The problem is that the academic incentives to write about the settled wisdom are close to nil. For example, in my career the piece of research that has had the greatest impact in Washington was an article that argued China’s ownership of U.S. debt did not and would not translate into political leverage. This argument seemed very counterintuitive to D.C. insiders, who insisted that this was a serious problem and that Beijing’s debt holdings “gives the Chinese de facto veto power” over U.S. policymaking. It seemed manifestly obvious to my international political economy colleagues, however. I wrote that article to get the ear of policymakers, and I succeeded in that task. Among my academic colleagues, I’ve received fainter praise. That article did not develop a new theory or uncover a new hypothesis; it merely confirmed what most scholars already believed. This kind of research isn’t seen as “cutting edge” – the kiss of death in the academy. Because it rests on settled wisdom, it would be hard for me to claim the argument as my innovation. So the incentive for junior faculty to perform this kind of scholarship is still pretty minimal.

Is there any hope for these tribes to overcome their flaws? The odds are not good that they will be able to do so on their own. These pathologies run very deep. Perhaps the best hope for us is to mix with each other more often. If there’s one thing that all members of the foreign policy community excel at, it is in pointing out the flaws of everyone else. Market folk need to learn about politics from academics and Beltway insiders. Academics need to learn about the erroneous assumptions made inside the Beltway. And D.C. folk need to find out when their collective consensus might be in error. Forcing the tribes to engage with each other will at least highlight the imperfections of the tribes to themselves. When it comes to understanding the world, a healthy dose of humility can be a very good thing.

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, a contributing editor for Foreign Policy and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.